Monday October 21, 2013

Dave Bonta October 21, 2013

Patches of frost in the yard. A yellow jacket from the underground nest in the garden lands on the shoulder of my sunlit coat.

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Overcast and cold. Every few minutes, another boom as our neighbors sight in their rifles. A wren and a nuthatch sound mildly irritated. …

Cloudy but bright. I notice many of the pits in the old snow, melted down by oak leaves, have acquired new snow and a second, upstairs leaf. …

The hiss of the wind. Oak leaves scud above the treetops in one direction while juncos and sparrows move through the weeds in the other. …

A huge number of crows hanging out in the treetops at the woods' edge—not mobbing anything, just being crows, arguing, sharing, kvetching. …

Blank white sky. The woods are quiet except for an occasional chickadee. From over at the neighbors', the labored putting of an old engine. …

A pileated woodpecker foraging near the ground suddenly flees yelling into the treetops. Several nearby juncos take off too, just in case. …

A maze of squirrel and sparrow tracks between ice-covered tufts of grass glittering in the sun. Down in the valley, a siren starts up. …

The sun rising through the trees off to the southeast seems so much less ambitious than last night's moon. Goldfinches' desultory chirps. …

Dawn light turns everything briefly to gold: house, trees, the three deer that run a short way into the woods and stop, nostrils flaring. …

Blue overhead, and the frost so heavy, it looks like a light snow. From the barnyard, the voices of hunters returning with their first kill. …

Soft-focus shadows from the high, thin clouds. Chickadees are calling chirree-chirrup, a car door slams, a crow goes yelling into the sun. …

The snow gives them away—a crunch of footsteps, the unambiguous shapes: five turkeys 150 feet away, going single-file through the laurel. …

"Crepuscular": such a weird word, conjuring up ancient forests, twisted mossy forms. Not this dawn, filled with the noise of trucks. …

The Morning Porch/Patio